Top Five Sales Activities that Drive Home Care Referrals (Sean Reiley)

Most home care sales reps stay busy—but very few generate high-quality referrals consistently. Sean Reiley, CTO at 52 Weeks Marketing, breaks down the specific sales activities, scorecards, benchmarks, and accountability systems that separate top-performing reps from everyone else. Sean shares the five sales activities that actually drive referrals, how many referral sources a rep should manage, what productivity should look like week-to-week, and the biggest mistakes operators and sales leaders make when managing referral accounts.

Play Episode

min

May 26, 2026

Top Five Sales Activities that Drive Home Care Referrals (Sean Reiley)

Miriam Allred (00:09)
Hey everyone, welcome back to the lab. Thank you for tuning in. If you're not subscribed, please hit follow wherever you're listening and it's great to be back with you. Today we are going to be talking about sales, activities, metrics, referral sources, bell cows, where reps are succeeding and failing, where leaders are failing or succeeding with reps. And today I am joined by Sean O'Reilly, the COO and CTO at 52 Weeks Marketing. Sean, welcome to the show.

Sean Reiley (00:10)
Thank you for having me. Much appreciated.

Miriam Allred (00:40)
I'm excited to get you out in front of this audience. just said to you, you're a little bit behind the scenes at 52 weeks marketing, but you're also a powerhouse and dynamo just like Debbie and the rest of the team. And so this is maybe your debut on the show. So happy to have you. Today's your day. Introduce yourself for those that don't know you talk a little bit about your background and home care and what led you to where you are.

Sean Reiley (00:53)
They don't let me out of the cage much. They don't.

Certainly. ⁓ I've been in IT pretty much my entire career. My entire family is either a clinician of some sort. either a nurse or a doc. And I'm talking like four docs, four nurses. So I kind of have that history. Went into consulting in IT early in the 90s. And from there, I got into doing startups.

So I've been involved in stratified areas from medication management to staffing, nurse staffing in particular, because there's a load balance aspect to that, to infectious surveillance, right? We just had COVID, to HIPAA secure communications, all within the vertical of healthcare. So that's my background, whether it's been consulting or on the technical side and coming up with solutions. So I've done quite a few startups, some good, we did well.

some not so good, you know, where that investment didn't pan out. That said.

I've been in home care for quite some time and for those that don't know Debbie is my spouse and I obviously live this dream of home care every day not just for 52 weeks I also manage other organizations across the country and three the Midwest the the West and the East Coast as well on top of our own organization here in Nashville so I have interplay and all these so I live the dream every day

I've done many, many assessments. I've been out in the field too. I've had that pleasure. So I tried to build technology on the basis of real world experience versus a use case list and then trying to go without having real context and understanding of solutions. And that's always kind of been my mantra and anything I've done is get my hands dirty and understand it.

I'm a developer by trade, when you have your own business, you gotta learn to sell, which means you pay other people to teach you how to sell. So we try to espouse those best practices, whether it's Miller Hyman or you might, some people remember giving the pickle. That was kind of a pretty popular thing, but there's quite a few different ⁓ tools ⁓ and systems out there that you can learn or adopt and make your own.

‍

Miriam Allred (03:29)
Great, great introduction. I'm going to just hit you with some questions like hot and fast right here out of the gate. You know so much about sales and you're working with so many agencies. You've said you're to the point where you're helping them.

higher sales rep. like you're on the ground floor as much as anybody else listening to this. so I'm just going to like get right into it with a few questions, including one that might feel a little bit odd, but I wanted to hit you with it directly because a lot of providers are using external CRMs at this point. know the EMRs, know the operating systems and they all have kind of a light version of CRMs. so a lot of home care providers

want and desire more and so they seek out home care specific CRMs. Many providers are frustrated and even confused as to why WellSky specifically does not integrate with most of the CRMs in the space. And I've heard it literally probably five times in the past two weeks. And so I'm just going to hit you with it directly. Why isn't WellSky integrated with more of the CRMs?

Sean Reiley (04:30)
This is an opinion only. I've had some engagement with them. The people are nice. I actually had an engagement with them in my past when they were ClearCare My feeling is, and there's two philosophies in software, that there are some that are all inclusive. So in other words, Epic is a health care, an EMR that is everything. That's their philosophy. You don't need anything else other than us.

That's what Apple was in the 80s, but Microsoft was the opposite. They opened it up for everybody. So there are different philosophies. They chose more of a self-contained philosophy. However, there are, if you do work with them, my past experience has been that there's incredible expenses associated with it. And anybody who provides a solution for people, we have to take into account our audience, what they can afford, what's fair.

You know, and so they're buying tools and technology that can help them not make them go bankrupt. So unfortunately, some of those costs were just a little too egregious for at least in the CRM space for how we could help our clients because we want a product for them that, you know, isn't isn't overwhelming, helps them manage their business grow. But you can't you can't have a price point that's not realistic. And unfortunately, they're not the only vendor, but some of those vendors to to

to integrate to them, the costs become a little too much. So it's really a cost issue. To that end, we build our technology. I built around the concept of speed. If we can't integrate to them, then what can we do from a manual perspective? Because it's designed to integrate to all the other players. And if for some reason one of the vendors we don't interface to, not a problem.

because we made it so quick and easy in RCM. I'm literally talking 15, 20 seconds so that duplication of effort is really not, it's five minutes a week tops. It's not a big operation.

Miriam Allred (06:35)
Yeah, that's perfect. I just want providers to understand I'm on no one's team here, but I like to defend the CRMs in that it's, it's WellSky putting up motes that are cost prohibitive to the CRMs, but the home care providers are justified in their frustration and that.

Sean Reiley (06:40)
Yeah. Well, just to be fair to to WellSky, Miriam, there's a cost issue. They're not alone in that, right? This is anybody, anytime you want to to partner with another organization for this, that is always something you have to weigh. And there's time elements to it, too. So, you know, they're not necessarily alone in that. It's just their costs happen to be a little bit more than than what would benefit the client.

‍

Download Transcript